The proliferation of specialized technology across multiple industries has led to an expanding problem of connecting together disparate information systems in a way that provides value that justifies the cost of creating interoperability. It is desirable to harness the collective knowledge of different systems for better management of intellectual assets, improved oversight of business or organization operations, and optimizing business or organization procedures. As the complexity of business or organization systems has grown and the IT components of business or organization processes have become more spread out, integration software has become more layered and segmented. Often, however, many current tools aimed at aggregating this information use poor methods for converting it into useable knowledge. These tools, often termed “middleware,” are designed to connect systems, not enhance them or learn from them. Middleware which synthesizes integration, analytics, and process awareness into a package can create new functionality and efficiency while preserving past investments in software and hardware.
Other tools, such as knowledge management software, are able to make limited strides towards refining this collected information into useable knowledge. However, there exist few solutions that are able to take information from multiple sources and provide effective wrapping of services and knowledge management. Knowledge management software and its sister field, Business or Organization Intelligence (BI), are becoming critical to creating and maintaining competitive business or organization advantages within multiple industries. Tools that attempt to fulfill these needs run the gamut from simple document management and organization software to enhanced heuristic or case-based categorization systems to the most advanced systems utilizing natural language processors for tackling limited semantic awareness.
Software Agents have become more and more ubiquitous in software development in a variety of fields. These autonomous programs lend themselves to popular and diverse applications in such fields as web services (called “bots”), customer relationship management (CRM) enhancement, “software wrapping” industrial equipment, and wireless intelligent networking software. In particular, the idea of using intelligent agents as wrappers on legacy systems to make these systems and their software operational with new applications and platforms is very appealing and could provide an advantageous approach for industries having the most acute need for intelligent middleware.
Therefore, what is needed is needed is more intelligent middleware to meet these objectives.